Firestone Walker is releasing their first India Pale Ale under the name Union Jack. It’s a double dry-hopped IPA and will be released today in bottles and on draft. It will be available through California and in parts of Nevada.
From the press release:
Given Matt’s skill as a brewer, I can’t wait to give this a try. |
Yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser had a nice profile of Maui Brewing (thanks Doug). It’s a nice overview of how Sacramento resident Garrett Marrero moved to Kahana, on Maui, after buying the old Fish and Game Brewing Co. & Rotisserie. They’ve also started hand-canning their beers, which are now featured on Hawaiian Airlines, which is a great package for an island like Hawaii.
Three of Maui’s beers in cans. The Porter won a gold medal at last year’s GABF. There’s a nice photo series of their first canning on their website.
Brewmaster Thomas Kerns owner Garrett Marrero. Tom was my judging roomie at last year’s Great American Beer Festival.
Even for those of you old enough to remember Thomas Kemper beer, not just the soda, you may not have known that there never was a Thomas Kemper. Instead the name came from the family names of the two founders, Andy Thomas and Will Kemper, who began brewing on Bainbridge Island in 1984 and soon after moved the brewery to the small town of Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Penninsula. My wife and I visited the brewery on our honeymoon in the summer of 1996. That was four years after it had been sold to Hart Brewing (later Pyramid Brewing). Initially ales were made under the Pyramid label and lagers under Thomas Kemper. For a trip down memory lane, check out their old labels at Corey and Nate’s Beer Labels website. Rande Reed, in fact, was the brewer there early on but later moved to Pyramid and then Snoqualmie Falls Brewing, before returning to musical pursuits.
But I was never sure what happened to the founders after their involvement ended. In turns out Will Kemper became a brewery consultant, helping launch such breweries as Philadelphia’s Dock Street, Seattle’s Aviator Ales, Capital City Brewing in D.C. and Denver’s Mile High Brewing. For the last year or so, Will and his wife Mari have been in Turkey, building a brewery in Istanbul called Taps. Now that the Taps project is completed they’ve returned to their home in Bellingham, Washington with plans to open a new brewery there this spring. It will be located in the Old Town part of town and have a capacity of 1,000 barrels, with expansion to 5,000 possible if successful. The new name will be Chuckanut Brewery & Kitchen, and the plan is to have six different beers and a lunch and dinner menu.
I’ve found that liquor stores in Colorado tend to be, on average, larger than in the rest of the country. And that’s most likely because of their laws. In an effort to keep chains out of the state, any business is only allowed to own one liquor license. So that means instead of successful companies opening new locations (which is prohibited), they instead make their one location larger. So there’s Applejack’s in Denver or Liquor Mart in Boulder and probably countless others I’m unaware of. Then there’s Daveco Liquors in Thornton, Colorado (a few miles north of Denver along I-25). The Guinness Book of World Records has certified that it’s the “largest liquor store in the world.” The 102,000 square foot store has 7,500 bottles in the wine cellar, 9,000 types of wine, 2,400 brands of liquor and 800 different beers (though that last one actually seems small to me).
From an article in today’s Denver Post:
“I kept saying this is the world’s largest liquor store, and people kept saying ‘You can never prove that,’ ” said [owner Henry] Sawaged. “But now people know I am a man of my word.”
Congratulations to Daveco.
Business Week online yesterday had an interesting article entitled Micro Beers Brew Up Big Business, with this promising subtitle: The brewing industry is becoming more consolidated, but for aficionados in the U.S. there has never been a better time to drink—or make—beer.
Typically, Adam Smith’s ghost is invoked and misapplied to suggest that “markets do work over time” and that’s why “[t]hroughout the 20th century local and regional breweries in the U.S. closed by the thousands as improved transportation and the economies of scale led to increasing consolidation” and that today because of it “the [beer] business is dominated by a handful of industrial-scale giants.” Smith, for anybody who’s actually read what he wrote, would have been appalled by the consolidation of so many industries. Even in his day, he thought large corporations were dangerous and needed to be kept in check. Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke, of all people, has a book out right now called On the Wealth of Nations, that offers a witty overview of Smith’s famous work.
That annoyance aside, what follows is a quick overview of the last 35 years in beerdom and his choices for 10 absolutely top-notch winners. From the text, I assume he attended GABF last year as he confesses to not trying all 1,884 that were poured at the festival. So while others who’ve picked up this story are saying they’re the “Top 10 Best American Beers,” the author himself is not saying that. They’re just ten great beers that he did manage to try, though in a remarkable coincidence each of his ten is available in a bottle.
There are, of course, some world class beers on his list — Anchor Liberty definitely deserves to be there — and a few head-scratchers (not that I’m naming names) but this is the sort of list that no two people will ever agree on. There’s also a slideshow showing the bottles and labels to all ten beers.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty years you undoubtedly know the iconic image of the album cover to the Beatles’ seminal work, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. There have been countless homages and parodies of the cover, from Frank Zappa to the Celebrator Beer News, who used it initially for their tenth anniversary. Their version, of course, features well know figures from the brewing industry, both past and present.
The original and the Celebrator’s beer world view.
Well, it seems there’s more of a connection to beer than first thought, as the artist who designed the Sgt. Pepper cover Peter Blake, has designed the label artwork for a new beer, which has been named the official beer of Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008. Better known simply as Liverpool 08, it’s a yearlong cultural event with something like 350 events taking place in Liverpool. There will be “more than 50 international festivals in art, architecture, ballet, comedy, cinema, food, literature, music, opera, science and theatre.” One billion people from more than 60 countries, across five continents, are expected to visit and/or participate.
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The beer itself is brewed by Cains, a Liverpudlian brewery that’s been brewing since 1870. Cains is using their award-winning Cain’s Finest Lager, which won awards at the 2005 CAMRA festival in Liverpool and “Best English Beer” at the 2005 CAMRA Scotland Beer Festival. From the website:
About 250,000 bottles will be produced, and it will also be available at the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern galleries in addition to the usual supermarkets and other outlets. They’ll keep using the label all year, but will discontinue it December 31. The BBC reported on it’s origin today as follows:
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Cains chief executive Sudarghara Dusanj said: “Sir Peter Blake is one of country’s best loved artists and, through his work with the Beatles, has built a strong affiliation with Liverpool so we couldn’t think of anyone better.
“The final design is truly striking.”
No doubt the bottle will be highly sought after by breweriana collectors.
Saturday’s Wisconsin State Journal had a very well done quiz on their state’s beer labels. They’ve removed the text from sixteen Wisconsin beer labels, and you have to choose which is which. I got two wrong, fourteen correct. How many can you get right? Post your results below. Enjoy.
Golden West Brewing, who is the parent company of Chico-based Butte Creek Brewing, issued a press release today that they have created a new division within the company, dubbed Blue Marble Brewing. This new division will be launching a new organic brand beginning next month with the release of Blue Marble Organic Pilsner. According to the press release, they “are in negotiations with a key nationwide retailer to create a nationwide platform for the selling and marketing of this exciting new brand.” PR-speak aside, presumably that would be a chain like Whole Foods, to hazard a guess.
Reuters is reporting that SABMiller has overtaken rival InBev to become the world’s largest beer company. This is based on preliminary numbers from 2007, and assumes both SABMiller completes the expected purchase of Grolsch and the S&N breakup is approved. Additionally, Heineken’s acquisition of a portion of S&N will also net them the number three spot, displacing Anheuser-Busch who’ll fall to fourth. That will make the new top five look like this:
The world beer market grew almost 5% in 2007, also based on the same preliminary figures, up from 3% the previous year.
The Barley Wine made by Bridgeport Brewing, Old Knucklehead, has long had one of my favorite names for a beer. For whatever reason, I’ve always loved the word knucklehead. As insulting epithets go, it hearkens back to a gentler age when people called each other big galoot, nincompoop or goof ball. To me, they’re the kind of insult you call your friend when he makes a mistake that you want to point out, but without really hurting his feelings. They seem more in the good-natured ribbing category of name-calling. And that’s how I see Old Knucklehead. With each label, a different beery luminary was featured in an illustration. Batch No. 11, for example, had Portland beer writer Fred Eckhardt on the label. The new one, which makes its debut today, has John DeBenedetti on it.
DeBenedetti owns F.H. Steinbart, a well-known homebrew shop in Portland. Batch 12 was aged in bourbon barrels and then was blended back into a cask. 1,100 cases will be bottled. John Foyston has the full story in today’s Oregonian.